The Art of the Possible with Modern BPM for Insurance

The famous German statesman, Otto von Bismark, is credited with saying “Politics is the art of the possible.” So too goes technology, particularly in insurance. Lots of things are theoretically possible to do with insurance information systems, if there are no constraints on resources. Insurance CIOs are never in that position. In fact, they are in the opposite corner, struggling to maintain legacy systems and still squeeze out some budget for technological innovations that will delight customers and employees. For them, developing new innovations is “the art of the possible.” In practice, not much can get accomplished, which is why so many insurers find themselves technologically behind.

That state of affairs is being upended as will be demonstrated at next week’s Appian World conference.

At Appian World 2012, our partners will showcase what can be done with a modern business process management platform that has great mobile, social, and cloud capabilities. Here’s a quick overview of what the over 600 people already registered for Appian World will get to see.

IBENOX is an Appian implementation partner. Headquartered in Sydney, Australia with operations around the globe, IBENOX has deep expertise deploying innovative technologies to solve complex organizational problems. The team at IBENOX recently created a demonstration where they integrated Appian’s BPM software with geo-location technology from Esri Australia. While that’s impressive by itself, what’s more impressive is that the integration was completed entirely in the cloud. The use case was a flood incident that an insurer needed to respond to. By integrating the geo-location information for a potential claim with similar information on location and severity of flood damage, automatic decisions can be made to immediately dispatch repair crews to the worst hit areas in the hopes that damage can be contained and the ultimate costs of claims reduced. A recorded demonstration of the application and how it works is available in this IBENOX blog post.

This type of mash-up has been possible for a long time, but practical resource limits have prevented it from being widely deployed. But with modern BPM, operating in the cloud, building this application is relatively straight forward. The IBENOX team shows everyone what’s “behind the curtain” in a second recorded demo showing the Appian process modeler and how the integrations were created in another blog post on their site. The team from IBENOX will be exhibiting at Appian World. Stop by to learn more about the innovations they can help you deliver.

New Appian partner, MajescoMastek, will also be exhibiting at Appian World and demonstrating their insurance claims processing framework which takes advantage of Appian’s built-in mobile BPM and social BPM capabilities. One of the best things about Mastek’s framework is that it can easily integrate with existing applications, allowing an insurer to avoid a full “rip and replace” of a claims system. Instead, Mastek enables insurers to “wrap and extend” to fix system limitations, automate work that has to be done manually, and add modern interfaces and social & mobile capabilities. The work Mastek has done not only breaks the insurance technology “art of the possible” conundrum by quickly delivering new capability, it also helps lower the cost of legacy maintenance which can begin a positive cycle of IT improvement.